LinkedIn Gets into the Business of News

Launched in beta this week, LinkedIn Today is a new social news service that strives to deliver the most-shared business headlines and stories across multiple industries to members of the professional network.

The new product is designed to provide LinkedIn users with access to the most relevant news based on the information in their professional profiles. Members can get news by following what their LinkedIn connections are reading, access a digest of what users in their specific industry are reading or see what headlines are trending across multiple industries throughout the entire network.

Users can also customize their LinkedIn Today accounts and follow up to 22 industries such as Internet, real estate, non-profit and more. They can follow specific news sources from a wide range of outlets to see the most shared headlines by source in addition to industry.

LinkedIn has also deepened its relationship with Twitter to allow users to bind their accounts and share updates on both. Members can tweet trending news to their Twitter accounts as well as post it to a LinkedIn group and email it directly to their existing LinkedIn connections.

The service is the latest in a flurry of new products from LinkedIn, which recently filed for its initial public offering. One of the primary goals behind many of the new features is to make the network more social by getting users to visit the site more often. A personalized news aggregation service is certainly one way to address that.